Mobile native video ads are establishing themselves as the new TV commercials for the Millennial generation – the hard to reach segment that’s switched off from watching television. It’s no surprise then, that the big global social apps like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and others, have developed strong engaging native video ad formats, giving advertisers access to over 2 billion global consumers, and investment is growing fast from brands, as they figure out how to reach their audiences as media consumption starts to shift towards mobile.

Facebook’s recent earnings report and various analyst commentary supports the increased adoption and higher investment that’s pouring into native video. What’s interesting about Facebook, is that video, traditionally a medium for building brand awareness, is now being used for direct response – app installations, transactions and lead generation. The other interesting point is that native video on Facebook is accelerating at a much faster rate than the mobile ad market as a whole – a clear, strong signal that great videos made for mobile with intuitive sign posting and calls-to-action drive results for direct response marketing – something we are sure DRTV experts would agree with.

LoopMe mobile native video ad format

LoopMe’s innovative native video ad format enables advertisers to place videos in-line alongside content, delivering a viewable and non-obtrusive ad experience for consumers. The LoopMe technology automatically plays a native video only once 50 percent of the video is visible on screen for the user. When scrolling and less than 50 percent of the video is visible, the video will pause and then resume later on at the place where it left off, if the user ever scrolls back. This is the perfect mobile ad scenario – a great audiovisual experience for brand building and getting messages across while respecting the user experience.

For advertisers, LoopMe offers global reach and scale with native video in brand safe environments from some of the largest app developers in world. For publishers, Our lightweight and open-source SDK enables quick and flexible integration.

LoopMe's mobile native video can be bought on a CPM or CPV (Cost-Per-View) advertising model and supports all industry third party tracking partners.

Mobile device usage is booming and as consumers, we are now spending as much time, if not more, looking at mobile screens as TVs. Mobile video advertising on apps has exploded via SDK integrations but mobile web has been somewhat left on the side.

That said, mobile web presents a massive opportunity for incremental advertising inventory and audiences, and the team at LoopMe has been busy developing a solution for advertisers and publishers. Furthermore, a web solution expands what’s possible today beyond apps to the entire mobile web. That’s a significant step forward.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new autoplay full-screen video ad unit for mobile web. How it works - videos will automatically play when users scroll to the point of the ad placement in the web page using the native video player.

Advertisers will have two two call-to-action options: either redirect users to a landing page if the user taps on a video or let the user see the full video and then present an end card with options. End-cards are fully customizable by advertisers and we have developed our own best practices to help advertisers get the best results.

This represents a significant opportunity for advertisers to massively increase the amount of available video ad inventory to meet increasing demand. Moreover, the great scale of the mobile web will enable advertisers to generate higher levels of brand awareness and engagement.

For publishers, this provides more options for monetizing their mobile inventory, but video offers options from premium high-quality campaigns from brands, with high CPMs and fill rates.

We’re always busy working on improvements to our mobile video ad solution. That's why we're very excited to announce that we’ve just launched new video ad features, including a new video interface design and ad metrics.

First of all, we’ve refreshed the colour palette, giving the video player a fresh and sleek looking interface. That not only makes the mobile video ads look more professional, but more importantly gives consumers a sense of reliability and trust, which is an important aspect for advertisers looking to place their brands and messages. Furthermore, the update to the font and colour gives the video ad content a lot more focus and attention. These cosmetic changes give users more visible control over the video ads.

Secondly, we’ve added some useful video metrics. We are in an era in which attention spans are getting shorter, and as consumers we are constantly getting flooded with content from multiple apps and other sources. Given all the marketing and peer-to-peer noise going on around us, advertisers need to cut through these distractions and attempt to hold on to consumers watching their mobile video ads for as long as possible. To address this challenge, we are now displaying an ad skip timer and ad length timer. The ad skip timer will appear in the bottom left hand corner to display the time remaining before the skip icon appears, and the ad length timer will appear in the bottom right corner. These visible timers aim to boost average view length and completed view rates, making video ads a lot stickier for consumers.

All these changes to the design and format, and the addition of two new timers have been applied to all videos served with the LoopMe SDK, third party SDKs and replaces the mobile web video template completely.

Adopting a full-screen approach to mobile advertising addresses many (but not all) of the viewability issues facing the mobile advertising ecosystem.

For starters, full-screen ad placements take up the entire screen of a mobile device, so that removes the challenges around placement and scrolling – the ad will always be visible to consumers. Next, the banner as we know it, is fading away and being replaced by other ad formats, such as video and native as the new dominant ad units of the future. Agencies and brands 'get' video as a format and many have successfully built up their brands on TV over the past decades – in other words, brands understand how to make great videos that work and how to measure them. Native, although a relatively new format for mobile, has been around in print and other media for some time, again, brands 'get' native advertising. Finally, as consumers, we’ve all grown up watching endless hours of TV commercials that are full-screen and one hundred per cent viewable – now we are extending that concept across to mobile – one that advertisers and agencies can easily wrap their heads around.

What’s becoming evident via the current market shift towards more engaging, interactive and larger ad formats (such as full-screen ads), is that consumers are getting a much better user experience. For advertisers, it gives them what they need in terms of higher engagement rates and the potential to impact brand metrics, and developers benefit from higher CPMs and ad quality – as brand spend opens up with newer ad formats.

Regarding viewability, the digital advertising ecosystem is still debating standards for online (yet alone mobile) and there’s general consensus that the Media Rating Council and the IAB standards do not go far enough, but nonetheless, a step in the right direction. The industry (agencies, ad tech players and publishers) are getting behind and working towards updating existing models with a view to publishing a new paper in 2016.

For now, the industry remains focused on solving the challenges with viewability online first, but what’s clear, is that mobile is emerging with less viewability problems than desktop. In what’s rapidly becoming a mobile-first society, dominated by applications, common issues on desktop like 'below-the-fold' are removed by full-screen ads.

That said, mobile advertising platforms that support payment and reporting by impressions served as well as full-screen ad formats (video, rich media and interstitial), go as far as possible in providing a solution now for advertisers that addresses the big elephant in the room – viewability.

As part of our continued growth with mobile video advertising, we are excited to announce the launch of the first global mobile video Exchange for all video ad formats. This expands on our existing publisher SDK solution by giving publishers more mobile video demand from top ad networks and DSPs.

Our mobile video Demand-Side Platform was the first to market that supported all mobile video ad formats (VAST, MRAID/HTML5, native, pre-roll and reward). Now we are taking things to the next logical step with development on the publisher side.

For advertisers, the new exchange will create more global supply of mobile video inventory across all formats and publishers. This will be achieved via access to other ad exchanges via the LoopMe Demand-Side Platform and direct relationships with brand-safe premium publishers on the LoopMe exchange.

Benefits for advertisers

The exchange will be available to ad networks and DSPs to easily plug into and get immediate access to unique global mobile video inventory. This will include access to some of the top ranked apps in the world and premium brands.

For demand sources with large video campaigns, we are be able to support all mobile ad formats, thereby giving ad networks and DSPs a compelling option for adding immediate global supply and testing across a range of video formats to determine what works best.

Benefits for publishers

For publishers, the LoopMe exchange will open up mobile video inventory to new advertisers and demand sources with strong global mobile video demand that will drive high fill rates and CPMs. While mobile video is still developing, there’s a growing need by ad networks and DSPs to continually tap into new supply sources that support industry standard ad formats.